Last year I wrote a piece on WUWT explaining that Antarctic ice doesn’t melt at -30C, and that University of Texas claims of East Antarctic ice loss were just plain daft. John Cook then wrote up a three part “rebuttal” which managed to completely avoid any of the issues I raised.

It now looks like NASA has also realized that ice doesn’t melt at -30C.

Science 22 July 2011:

Antarctic Ice’s Future Still Mired in Its Murky Past

Richard A. Kerr

A new reanalysis by two NASA scientists of the three standard ice-monitoring techniques slashes the estimated loss from East Antarctica, challenging the large, headline-grabbing losses reported lately for the continent as a whole.

Dave, the bastards beat me to it! They have to come up with something to explain the lack of temp movement within the last decade. Right before I drifted to sleep last night, I thought about writing a post graphically illustrating the northern polar ice cap loss comparing to global temps.

One of the big issues of the alarmism is that our polar caps are some sort of thermostat for the earth with albedo and all. If they melt, our earth is suppose to heat up and quick! More, this heat should be instantly noticeable. Because the albedo(on the surface) is the last thing that occurs before heat hits the earth! Given the significant ice loss of the arctic, this posit is apparently destined to “Myth Busters”.

However, NASA added a two-step to the dance. The Antarctic must be gaining ice! If not, the run-away-global-warming-tipping-point-via-polar-melt-hypothesis is falsified!

If you get the time, it would be nice to see a long form explanation of your position on the ice melt, his rebuttal, and now the new news. I confess I read your post back then but don’t really remember it so well. (getting old I guess)

lol, those were the days!!! It was that post that I affirmed what I already knew. Alarmists are some very dense people. Most didn’t even understand the entirely different implications of ablation, sublimation, and melt. Much less that measurements of “ice” total are woefully inadequate.

The more I consider satellites, the more I think they are incapable of such precision. And, people are just making stuff up as they go along.

No doubt……most of that stuff is mind numbingly monotonous. But there in the mix is the sordid details. Its simply overwhelming to consider all of the things we take as a given based on satellite observations. For some reason, these things have gone beyond proper scrutiny. I think the thing that set it for me in the beginning, is the divergence between UAH and RSS. While both like to point out their 30 yr temp trend is almost identical, they both got there very differently. I can remember when UAH was the sat record of choice for skeptics and RSS was quoted by the alarmists, now the roles are reversed. RSS shows cooling while UAH shows warming.

One of them is to be believed the other is not. But more importantly, this also holds true for our past readings. It’s impossible to know which direction we’re heading if we don’t know where we came from. It’s all BS.

First off, who in their right mind would read a report that’s over 150 pages of saying the same thing – 500 different ways…..
then they buried the meat of it in the last few pages…..knowing that no one would read that far……

When the satellites didn’t say what they “expected” them to say…..
…..they adjusted them to the climate computer models

When the satellite measurements diverged again………they adjusted them to the climate computer models again!

There is an additional error when estimating the measured ice loss. Sublimation occurs year-round, even at very low temperatures, as long as it is windy and dry. Several papers report measured ice sublimation rates of more than 30 cm per year in the Antarctic. With about 14,000,000 km^2 of ice, that comes to a sublimation rate of up to 2400 km^3 (= 2400 GTon) per year. Then there is the question of whether the sublimated water vapor is lost to the oceans or redeposited elsewhere on the continent.

Lots of uncertainties in these ice loss WAG’s, especially since the losses are in the low parts per million per year.

I don’t understand…of course ice “melts” (i.e., is lost) at -30 C, have you heard of sublimation? Look, all you haters, just because you hate the alarmists, doesn’t mean you automatically dismiss everything they say. If you do, you’re at the same risk of looking like a jack-a$$ as they do.